If you want to be employed as a writer, then you need to get a salaried job. In one of my many articles on this topic, I did some calculations. If every writer on Medium was paid $1000 per month, it would cost Medium something like $3 BILLION per year. Medium has never been in profit.

It's also true to say that the 95% of people who toil away at stories aren't sufficiently read to be profitable to the company.